Cousins

by Aurora Venturini

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Pub Date May 16 2023 | Archive Date Apr 30 2023

Catapult, Counterpoint Press, and Soft Skull Press | Soft Skull

Women's Fiction

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Description

The literary masterpiece of Aurora Venturini, a major voice in international literature, never before translated into English

At the age of eighty-five, Aurora Venturini stunned Argentine readers when her darkly funny and formally daring novel, Cousins (Las primas), won Página/12’s New Novel Award. She had already written more than forty books, but it was only then, in 2007, that she was widely recognized as a paradigm-shifting voice in Spanish-language literature.

Venturini never stopped writing in her ninety-two years, and produced an oeuvre that is mischievous and stylish, vital and mysterious, and completely original. She lived a life immersed in the literature and culture of the twentieth century: her first award was given to her in person by Jorge Luis Borges; she was friends and colleagues with Eva Perón; and when she lived in exile in Paris, she socialized with a sparkling milieu of writers and philosophers, including Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Cousins, widely regarded as Venturini’s masterpiece, is the story of four women from an impoverished, dysfunctional family in La Plata, Argentina, who are forced to suffer through a series of ordeals, including illegal abortions, miscarriages, sexual abuse, disfigurement, and murder, narrated by a daughter whose success as a painter offers her a chance to achieve economic independence and help her family as best as she can.

Neighborhood mythologies, family, female sexuality, vengeance, and social mobility through art are explored and scrutinized in the unmistakable voice of Yuna—who stares wildly at the world in which she is compelled to live—a voice unique in contemporary literature whose unconventional style can be candid, brutal, sharp, and utterly breathtaking. With the translation of Cousins into several languages for the first time, Aurora Venturini is now being discovered internationally and championed as a major voice in Latin American literature.

Advance Praise

“Cousins is a novel that makes you laugh out loud with its provocations and unexpected choices. Bodies are pushed to the limit in writing that gushes forth like blood. With Cousins Aurora Venturini achieved the acclaim she’d been seeking all her life and enjoyed it in characteristic fashion: baring the scars of the monstrous persona she cultivated with ironic lucidity.”

—Mariana Enríquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

“Cruel and strange and colorful—Cousins will be an immediate favorite for fans of Fleur Jaeggy and Leonora Carrington.”

—Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X and Pew

“Brimming with life, humor, and a vital twist of darkness, Venturini's English-language debut marks the arrival of a singular voice with a sharp, visceral approach to story. Reading Cousins is like being inside the belly of a wild, rambunctious beast, going where it goes, exhilarated no matter how perilous the journey.”

—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun

“Women are the fiery nucleus of Cousins, a hellishly tender and hilariously twisted Little Women. Venturini seems to caress the monstrosity of her invention like a dearly freakish pet, and that intimacy shines through the darkness of her writing, so full of candor and brilliance, like a creature of obsidian light.”

—Pola Oloixarac, author of Mona

“Cousins is a unique, extreme novel of disarming originality.”

—Alan Pauls, author of A History of Money

“When I first read Venturini, it was a genuine discovery, the kind that Pascal describes in Memorial. Reading, real reading, is the Stendhal syndrome, it’s like being bombarded, and that’s what Aurora Venturini is . . . Venturini’s characters fit Kafka’s premise that ‘Writing . . . is to leap out of the ranks of murderers.’”

—Ariana Harwicz, author of Tender

“One has no choice but to succumb to Yuna Riglos’ corrosive charm.”

—Camila Sosa Villada, author of Bad Girls

“Monstrous but brilliant with hair-raising humor: to read Aurora Venturini is to be presented with a sometimes unnerving degree of originality. The narrator’s voice veers between raw intelligence and dumb ingenuity, and therein lies the genius of its style.”

—Clarín